MIDI Motion Capture for Maya, by Casey Muller
http://null-terminated.com/MayaMIDI

April 16, 2003
Version 0.2

Made the demo do a bit of interpolation, added twice as many keys, changed to POSY instead of ROTZ.

April 06, 2003
Version 0.1

I wrote this in one night, and it was my first time with both low-level MIDI 
under Windows and Maya's mocap system. Surprisingly, it works very well, but 
only does what I needed and not a lot more.

On my system it provides from my USB keyboard:
- Key velocities from keys 36-81 (two octaves above and below middle C).
- Pitch wheel
- Volume slider

Hopefully it'll be somewhat useful with your setup. If you need something 
different, email mayamidi(at)null-terminated.com. If it's just a different 
configuration under Windows, use the -v flag to get the control codes and send 
them to me. If you want Linux support or a GUI or something, I would probably 
need compensation/credits or many requests.


INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE DEMO:

1) Plug in your keyboard, midi-pad whatever, and don't have any other 
   applications open it.

2) Go to the directory with MayaMIDI in it and run 'mayaMIDI -l' to list your MIDI 
   input devices.

3) Run 'mayaMIDI -m <num>' where <num> is the device you want (for zero, just run 
   with no args).

4) Go to Maya, drag and drop the mayaMIDI.mel.

5) Type 'mayaMIDI' in the command line in a new project.

6) Try playing the middle couple octaves, using the pitch wheel, and the volume 
   slider.


POTENTIAL PROBLEMS/LIMITATIONS:
- If you kill the program while it still has a MIDI device open, you need to 
  reboot to use MIDI again with some drivers. Quit Maya first and wait until you 
  see the "MIDI Closed" message. This could be fixed several ways if I were 
  getting paid.
- If you want to simultaneously record audio MIDI, it seems to work best if you 
  get mocap all running, then open your audio application.
- My keyboard only generates NOTE ON messages, and just uses zero to mean off. 
  If yours properly sends NOTE OFF messages, I will happily ignore them.
- My keyboard only sends a single on value for the keys, which makes them pretty 
  blunt tools, although the pitch wheel and volume slider are much better. I 
  hope yours provide more info, but if not, I've had good luck applying a 
  low-pass filter with expressions within Maya.

SHAMELESS PLUG:
I'm a student, graduating June 2003 and looking to enter the visual effects 
field as a programmer or technical artist. Email job(at)null-terminated.com if
you're interested in talking about my qualifications.